And I don't think we can rule out the possibility that pain is under-treated, or might be, depending on how we address the opioid problem. That's one of the difficulties: addressing the abuse without unnecessarily condemning some people -- possibly including some who never misused pain meds -- to suffer unnecessarily.

You definitely can't rule out the under treatment of pain or the valid use of even highly addictive pain killers when nothing else works.

What can be addressed though are;

The prescribing must be medically justified

MDs that write thousand of scripts per month are doing something wrong

pharmacies selling tens of thousands of pill per month are doing something wrong

A couple of pharmaceutical companies misrepresented many of these drugs as "non-addictive", which was incorrect and should be prosecuted